Goals

The primary goal of this project is a linguistically analyzed and searchable archive of annotated Burushaski texts. The database for the archive comprises high quality digitized audio and video recordings of oral literature from different, significantly threatened, regional varieties of Burushaski, viz., Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin in Pakistan and Srinagar in India.

Following the latest technology recommendations for language documentation, the primary project objective was to collect, analyze, annotate, and archive Burushaski oral literature in various genres including: traditional stories and mythical legends, historical accounts, personal narratives, formal speeches, conversations, poems, speaker-to-speaker discussions of data, and metadata. A selection of the materials is provided with time-aligned transcriptions, multi-tier annotations, morpheme-to-morpheme and free translations into English.

A second outcome of the project are pedagogical materials for promoting language revitalization. This has been done considering the community’s strong interest in this aspect. The pedagogical materials consist of: introduction to the Burushaski alphabet, wordlists, parts of speech, basic grammar, and small edited texts. The documentation materials, including data, description of data, texts and translations, sound files and video recordings, and metadata, will be archived and preserved at the University of North Texas Digital Collections Library. Copies of the materials have also been disseminated to various community members on request in print as other media, such as, CDs, DVDs, etc.